Paladino: Don't call Taxpayers a party

Appearing this morning on Fred Dicker’s radio show, gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino made it clear that his new ballot line, Taxpayers, isn’t a party.

Dicker said that he had heard that there were two monickers floating around, but Paladino said there was “only one name for the party: It’s called the Taxpayers, uh, party, and it’s going to — uh, well, the line is called Taxpayers.'”

Paladino said a plurality of people on his Web site had chosen “Taxed Enough Already” as the name for the par —uh, the whatchamacallit, but he and his staff decided that since that phrase would be more than 16 characters long, they would have to use the acronym TEA, “which was upsetting to many people in the Tea Party movement because they were getting the impression that we were trying to start a party. That is far from our intent. Our intent is solely to have a place for the movement people to go to, for the disaffected voters to go to other than the Republican line.”

Paladino said he’s spent “somewhere over a million” on his campaign so far; his campaign expenditures will be filed next week.

He said “party elites” had made overtures to get him to drop his bid. “They’re in denial, these people,” he said. His assessment of Rick Lazio’s campaign was similarly dismissive: “It’s dead; it’s a flop.”

Paladino said that the recent crisis e-mail from Primary Challenge suggesting that the group was having trouble ponying up names didn’t faze him, and that PC’s efforts represented only about 10 percent of his plan.

The latest Siena poll found that in hypothetical matchups, Andrew Cuomo leads Lazio 60-24 percent (down from 66-24 percent on May 24); Cuomo’s lead over Paladino fell to 60-23 percent (down from 65-22 percent). In a Republican Party primary, Lazio leads Paladino 45-18 percent.